1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a filesystem for use in a computer, embedded controller, or the like. More particularly, this invention is directed to a filesystem that represents content from various, disparate multimedia devices in a unified filesystem representation for access by one or more higher-level applications.
2. Related Art
Multimedia systems may employ multiple media players for playback of multimedia content. Such players include cell phones with Secure Digital (SD) Cards that play encoded music files, Sony® PlayStationPortable® units that use Sony® Memory Stick technology for storage and playback of encoded music files, iPod® devices that employ internal hard disk drives for storage and playback of media files, including video media files, and other media players, including those that employ Universal Serial Bus (USB) flash memory. Media files may be encoded on these devices using a variety of different formats such as MPEG layer III (MP3) encoding, Windows Media Audio (WMA) encoding, Windows Media Video encoding, RealAudio encoding, RealVideo encoding, DVD video, CD audio, and the like files.
Such devices do not include filesystems that are organized in a readily accessible manner. Rather, these systems may use proprietary formats, often with digital rights management (DRM) protection, which makes it very difficult to access and manage their data content with a generic personal computer or embedded processor. As a result, many software and hardware systems that interact with these devices and systems must be custom designed to accommodate their proprietary device formats. These multimedia systems and devices therefore are not readily adaptable to today's interconnected world in which a vast interactive network of personal computing devices reside in almost every home and office, as well as a quickly growing proportion of automobiles, wireless personal digital assistants and telephones.